“How would you do it?”
The question that changed everything.
Two senior consultants asked me to join a culture transformation at one of the Netherlands’ largest asset managers. Before I agreed, I asked them one question.
I asked how flooding an organization with external people would serve the client. Silence. Then they asked:
They agreed. One year later, the CEO said:
The real reason programs fail
The consulting industry has a financial incentive to keep you dependent. There’s a better model.
Every year organizations spend millions on Lean Six Sigma consultants who deliver a report, present a roadmap, collect their fee — and leave. Six months later the results have evaporated and the same problems are back. Not because the methodology failed. Because nothing stayed inside.
The tools aren’t the problem. Leadership is. It always is. When leaders aren’t aligned, when “improvement” is something consultants do while leaders watch — the program dies the moment the consultants leave.
There’s also the economics nobody talks about. The industry benchmark for a traditional Black Belt-led project is $175K–$300K in annual savings per project. One deployment. One organization’s own people. €21M identified. That’s 70–120x the industry benchmark. Using 20% of the tools.
Their own people found it. Nobody told them to.
1,400-person technical services organization · Post-merger
annual savings identified by their own people — ~20% of yearly budget
Lean Six Sigma
Lean5Sigma
Before the engine — the measurement
The reason programs fail is always leadership. That’s where the scan starts.
The Leadership Friction Scan measures four dimensions of structural friction: bottleneck, silos, fixing, and playbook. Every failed improvement program has at least two of these running at high levels. Most organizations have never measured them.
In 5 minutes you’ll see whether your leadership structure is ready to run its own improvement engine — or whether the same pattern that kills consulting programs would kill this one too. Better to know before you invest.
Your people already know where the waste is. See what’s blocking them from fixing it.
20 questions. 5 minutes. Your primary friction pattern named — and the structural constraint that’s keeping your organization dependent on outside help.